Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Social policy
Under the CDP, participants are required to attend frequent appointments with
their service provider, actively look for jobs, and undertake up to 25 hours of workfor-the-dole
activities per week. If participants do not comply with program rules,
they can have their welfare income suspended until they re-engage.
The requirements under the CDP are more intensive and punitive than for
unemployed persons living in urban parts of Australia who operate in the urbanequivalent
program, JobActive. 62 At least partially as a result of this, substantially
more financial penalties have been applied under the CDP than under JobActive
(despite JobActive having over 20 times more participants) and also under previous
remote programs. 63 However,noncompliancewithCDPrulescanresultfroma
range of factors, including low English literacy (e.g. participants not being able
to communicate with program staff, who rarely speak Indigenous languages), and
cultural/family commitments. 64 For at least some participants, noncompliance may
also result from poor health and wellbeing, which may not be properly assessed
or for which participants may not be able to provide adequate supporting documentation,
due to poor access to medical facilities in remote communities. 65
Nevertheless, the high rate of financial penalties under the CDP has led to reductionsinincomeforsomeofAustralia’smostsociallydisadvantagedandpoorest
populations. 66
The CDP seeks to address the perceived issue of welfare dependency by
‘activating’ and upskilling individuals, thereby implying that inactivity and poor
skills are the causes of unemployment. However, there are obvious silences in this
framing of the issue. For instance, remote economies where the CDP operates
are generally very weak, with relatively few job opportunities available. Thus, the
demand for jobs regularly outstrips supply, leading to entrenched high unemployment.
However, this is not appropriately acknowledged in the design of the CDP.
As Jordan and Altman argued, ‘if one acknowledges the major structural barriers to
employment opportunity, it is difficult to accept that withholding welfare payments
unless recipients display the “correct” behaviours (judged according to mainstream
Australian norms) will be sufficient to lead to a job’. 67
The CDP also does very little to address other barriers to employment, including
the multifaceted circumstances of disadvantage experienced by many CDP
participants, like poorer health, standards of living, and access to basic social
services. Much of this intergenerational disadvantage is the result of settler violence
and racist colonial policies. Thus, withholding payments for noncompliance with
the CDP punishes individuals for circumstances that are, in many cases, caused by
broader socio-political and historical issues.
62 Jordan 2016.
63 ANAO 2017; Fowkes 2016.
64 SSCFPA 2017; Staines 2018.
65 SSCFPA 2017.
66 Kral 2016.
67 Jordan and Altman 2016, 10.
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